Baldwin, Jeff
http://hdl.handle.net/10211.3/176420
2024-03-29T02:14:26ZLife, Labor, and Value. Recreating Affective Food Ecologies Through Interspecies Cooperation
http://hdl.handle.net/10211.3/186012
Life, Labor, and Value. Recreating Affective Food Ecologies Through Interspecies Cooperation
Baldwin, Jeff
As our most complex and intimate relationship with wider environments, food and agriculture provide important opportunities for exploring affective ecologies. Here I re-visit some of the ways that Modern constructs of humans as radically different from environments and of value as a function of exchange work to produce agricultural systems that are ever less affective and more problematic. In an effort to construct value in a way more applicable to the whole of our biosphere, and not only to humans, I take up an explicitly non-Modern Heraclitean perspective which conceives of all life as essentially relational. I then extend Marx’s anthropocentric work to argue that all life labors to organize stocks and flows in environments which it finds useful and thus valuable. As co-adaptation illustrates, often produces value by finding usefulness in the by-products of other lives. Thus, we may understand ecological relationships as guided by the creation of abundance rather than the imposition of scarcity. From the Marxist tradition I then enlist the concepts of cooperation, which produces value synergistically, and exploitation which destroys the ability to create value, to suggest a basis for the evaluation of socio-natural trajectories, for creating more and less affective food ecologies.
2016-01-01T00:00:00ZSustainability Education Through Active-Learning in Large Lecture Settings: Evaluation of Four Out-Of-Class Exercises
http://hdl.handle.net/10211.3/185347
Sustainability Education Through Active-Learning in Large Lecture Settings: Evaluation of Four Out-Of-Class Exercises
Baldwin, Jeff
Large classes on sustainable development present certain challenges. Often high student-to-instructor ratios encourage passive learning pedagogies. However, because sustainability education seeks to increase awareness and help students shift to more sustainable behaviors, more active learning is often prescribed by pedagogical experts. This study provides analysis of four out-of-classroom activities undertaken by students in recent offerings of an experimental course on sustainable development taught at Sonoma State University in California, USA. Those activities, innovated specifically for this course, attempt to increase learner-centered activities in large classes that averaged 124 students. Analysis of open-ended reflections indicates that many students experienced raised awareness of sustainability issues. Beyond aspirational statements, student reflections and actual behavioral tracking indicate some shifts to lower carbon food choices in just four weeks.
Published by the European Scientific Institute.
2016-12-01T00:00:00ZThe Pacific Asian Financial Crisis, Indonesian Forests, and "Us": Synthesizing a Multi-Perspective Application of Massey's Space
http://hdl.handle.net/10211.3/176421
The Pacific Asian Financial Crisis, Indonesian Forests, and "Us": Synthesizing a Multi-Perspective Application of Massey's Space
Baldwin, Jeff
This article addresses an issue that is both a problem for society and an opportunity for geography. Increased by globalization, spatial distance and social complexity often obscure interconnections between citizens of the first world and distant and different peoples and places. While geography's spatial perspective and multiple subdisciplines offer tools that can clarify such interrelationships, our analytic perspectives do not explicitly direct researchers to do so. That the public desires such geographies is evident in the popular success of works by nongeographers, many of whom have served as keynote speakers at recent AAG meetings. This paper elaborates the relational ontology developed by Doreen Massey as a framework for combining several analytic perspectives in order to produce a narrative that explicitly identifies interrelationships between us/here/now with them/there/when. Specifically the paper draws from political ecology and economy, commodity chain analysis, cultural economy, and economic geography perspectives. The research project itself is aimed at producing a narrative that traces the interrelationships between "us," the 1997 Thai financial collapse, the resulting wider Pacific Asian crisis, and its expression in Indonesia's forests. As the paper illustrates, through synthesis the analytic perspectives already in use by geographers can be used to clarify the intimacy and dialectic quality of relations across distance. The paper suggest that while finely focused geographic research is vital, in some instances a breadth of approach also is appropriate and useful.
2010-01-01T00:00:00Z